I’m In Denver September 27, 2013September 27, 2013 No one blogs from Denver. At least not while they’re driving into the mountains. But this is why God invented archives. Oh, oKAY! Here’s four minutes of Jon Stewart — the already famous clip where “you don’t get a war! and you don’t get a war! and everybody doesn’t get a war!” If you haven’t seen it, click. If you have, you’re already laughing, remembering it. Oh, OKAYYYY! A few of you probably want to know why NKTR, suggested here, gave back the nice 35% gain we had in it all of a sudden this morning. Guru: “The reduction in pain is 40%. That’s exactly in line with studies by Caldwell (1999) and Roth (2000) using oxycodone in the same osteoarthritis setting. In the NKTR study, only 3% of the patients were not able to achieve pain relief, at the better end of the 2%-10% seen with oxycodone. Of those enrolled, 18% dropped out for side effects typical of opiates such as constipation, in contrast to the typical 36% for oxycodone (which also produces dizziness and nausea, not found with NKTR-181). The ONLY difference between this trial and the studies above is that in above studies, when half the patients went onto placebo, their pain reappeared by day 21, whereas in this study, the placebo patients reported NO rebound in pain. Of course, physiologically that doesn’t make much sense. Lots of possible explanations. Still, the bottom line conclusion is that NKTR-181 has the same degree of efficacy as oxycodone while having essentially none of the addiction or respiratory depression risk. Thus, NKTR can use this data to proceed to a standard opiate Phase III trial early in 2014 as planned. If the drug had performed below expectations, then there would be issues about whether the modification impaired its efficacy, but it didn’t. I continue to think this will be a blockbuster drug. In the after market, the stock dropped below 10 (as I expected), but I expect it will rally back to 11 to 12 today and work its way higher into 2014. They have an analyst R&D day October 8, they have two more pain drugs to report on this year–similarly modified like 181, but for different pain indications–and they have filed for FDA approval for a drug to relieve opioid constipation with partner Astra Zeneca. We bought aggressively below 10 and NKTR is now one of the largest positions in the fund.”